MFA Visiting Faculty

During the summer and winter residencies for SNHU's MFA in fiction and nonfiction writing, students attend classes and at least one reading by a prominent writer who serves as a visiting faculty member.

Jane Hamilton - 2014 Visiting Faculty

Jane Hamilton is the author of six award-winning and bestselling novels. Her first novel, ''The Book of Ruth,'' won a PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation award, was an Oprah Book Club selection, and was made into a television movie. Her second novel, ''Map of the World,'' was made into a major motion picture and was also an Oprah Book Club selection. Her third novel, ''The Short History of a Prince,'' was a Publishers Weekly Best Book, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. ''Disobedience'' was recognized by The New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year, and ''When Madeline Was Young'' was selected as a Best Book by Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and Seattle Times. Other awards Hamilton has received include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Heartland Prize, and The Wisconsin Library Association’s Banta Award for Distinguished Work. Hamilton has held teaching appointments through the Ragdale Foundation, Carleton College – Visiting Benedict Professor of English, Vermont Studio Art Center, and Warren Wilson MFA Program.

Andre Dubus III - 2013 Visiting Faculty

Andre Dubus III is the author of five books: ''The Cage Keeper and Other Stories''; ''Bluesman''; and The New York Times Best Sellers, ''House of Sand and Fog,'' ''The Garden of Last Days,'' and his memoir, ''Townie.'' A #4 New York Times Best Seller, it is a New York Times Editors’ Choice and is named on many top non-fiction books of 2011 lists including The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, The Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, and Esquire magazine. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for fiction, the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. An Academy Award-nominated motion picture and published in 20 languages, his novel ''House of Sand and Fog'' was a fiction finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Book Sense Book of the Year, and was an Oprah Book Club Selection and #1 New York Times Best Seller.

Chris Bohjalian - 2012 Visiting Faculty

Chris Bohjalian is the author of fourteen books, including his newest novel, The Night Strangers. Before Night Strangers, Bohjalian’s novel, Secrets of Eden, debuted at # 6 on both the New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists.

His other novels include the bestsellers, Skeletons at the Feast, The Double Bind, Before You Know Kindness, The Law of Similars, and Midwives.

Chris won the New England Book Award in 2002, and his novel, Midwives, was a number one New York Times bestseller, a selection of Oprah's Book Club, a Publishers Weekly ''Best Book,'' and a New England Booksellers Association Discovery pick. His work has been translated into over 25 languages and twice become movies (''Midwives'' and ''Past the Bleachers''). He has written for a wide variety of magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest, and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and has been a Sunday columnist for Gannett's Burlington Free Press since 1992. Chris graduated from Amherst College, and lives in Vermont with his wife and daughter. You can learn more about him here and on Facebook . And, if you like, follow him on twitter as well.

David Carroll - 2011 Visiting Faculty

Naturalist-artist David M. Carroll, who in 2006 was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, is the author of three acclaimed natural histories ''The Year of the Turtle,'' ''Trout Reflections,'' and ''Swamp-Walker's Journal.'' The latter was awarded the John Burroughs medal for distinguished nature writing. This ''wet-sneaker trilogy'' was expanded to a quartet with the publication of his memoir, centered on his lifelong connection with turtles and their habitats, ''Self-Portrait with Turtles.''

His fifth book, ''Following the Water, a Hyrdromancer's Notebook,'' published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in August 2009, was awarded a National Book Foundation Finalist Medal in the nonfiction category.

In addition to his own field work, Carroll has conducted investigations for the endangered species programs of New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, as well as for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Park Service. His fieldwork has been published in scientific journals, including Chelonian Conservation and Biology and Northeastern Naturalist.

Carroll and his work have been the subject of numerous articles and interviews, and his artwork has been widely exhibited. He is a lecturer and turtle and wetlands preservation advocate, and has received are the Environmental Merit Award from the U.S. EPA and the New Hampshire Audubon Society’s Tudor Richards Award.

Carroll is a graduate of the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University. He received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of New Hampshire and an honorary master’s in environmental science from New England College.

Ann Hood - 2010 Visiting Faculty

The author of 10 books, including most recently the bestselling novel ''The Knitting Circle'' and the memoir ''Comfort: A Journey Through Grief,'' which was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and was chosen as one of the top 10 nonfiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly.

Her short stories and essays have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, Bon Appetit, Traveler, Food and Wine, More, Tin House, Glimmertrain and The Paris Review. She has won a Best Spiritual Writing Award and two Pushcart Prizes.

Joyce Maynard - 2010 Visiting Faculty

The author of eight books, including the novel ''To Die For,'' which was adapted into a screenplay and became a box-office hit starring Nicole Kidman, Matt Dillon and Joaquin Phoenix. She is also the author of the bestselling memoir, ''At Home in the World,'' in which she broke her silence about her years-long affair with reclusive author J.D. Salinger; it has been translated into 11 languages.

Her novel, ''The Usual Rules'' - a story about surviving loss - has been a favorite of book club audiences of all ages and was chosen as one of the 10 best books for young readers for 2003. Her latest work, ''Labor Day,'' will be published by William Morrow in August 2009.

Maynard first came to national attention with the publication of her New York Times cover story, ''An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life,'' in 1973, when she was a freshman at Yale. Since then she has been a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, a contributor to the CBS program ''Spectrum,'' a syndicated newspaper columnist whose ''Domestic Affairs'' column appeared in more than 50 papers nationwide, and a regular contributor to National Public Radio and national magazines, including Vogue, O, The Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, Forbes, Salon, San Francisco Magazine and many more.

Her essays have been widely published in collections and featured in The New York Times. She is a contributing writer at MORE magazine.

A native of New Hampshire, Maynard now makes her home in Mill Valley, Calif., and at Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, where she runs the Lake Atitlan Writing Workshop, which she founded in 2002.

Francine Prose - 2009 Visiting Faculty

Francine Prose is the author of numerous novels, including My New American Life (HarperCollins, 2011); Goldengrove, a profoundly moving novel about a young girl plunged into adult grief and obsession after the drowning death of her sister; A Changed Man, for which she won the first Dayton Literary Peace Prize in fiction; and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award. About My New American Life, Donna Seaman wrote, ''Prose is dazzling in her sixteenth book of spiky fiction, a fast-flowing, bittersweet, brilliantly satirical immigrant story that subtly embodies the cultural complexity and political horrors of the Balkans and Bush-Cheney America.''

Prose's nonfiction books include, Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife (HarperCollins, 2009); Reading Like A Writer (2006), a New York Times bestseller The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired, a national bestseller; Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles, a biography of the painter for the Eminent Lives series; Sicilian Odyssey, a travel book; and; Gluttony, a meditation on a deadly sin. Her award-winning young adult novels include Bullyville and After. She is also the author of Hunters and Gatherers, Bigfoot Dreams and Primitive People, two story collections, and a collection of novellas, Guided Tours of Hell. Prose has also written four children's books and co-translated three volumes of fiction. Her stories, reviews and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Observer, Art News, The Yale Review, The New Republic, and numerous other publications.

Anne Fadiman - 2008 Visiting Faculty

Visiting writer for 2008, Fadiman won a National Book Critics' Circle Award for her first book, ''The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,'' about an epileptic Hmong child and her family in Merced, Calif. “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader,'' her best-selling book, is a collection of essays originally published in the Library of Congress's Civilization magazine, of which Fadiman served as a founding editor. She also served as the long-time editor of ''The American Scholar.''

Fadiman is the first Francis Writer in Residence, Yale University's chair in nonfiction writing. She serves as an English professor and a mentor to students considering careers in writing or editing.

Fadiman's work has appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker and The New York Times, among many other publications. She has won National Magazine Awards for reporting and essays. Anne Fadiman was the editor of the 2003 edition of ''Best American Essays and Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love.'' Her latest essay collection, ''At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays,'' came out in 2007.

Richard Rhodes - 2007 Visiting Faculty

Rhodes is the author or editor of 22 books, including ''The Making of the Atomic Bomb,'' which won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award; ''Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb,'' which was one of three finalists for a Pulitzer Prize for history; ''Why They Kill,'' an investigation of the roots of private violence; ''A Hole in the World,'' a personal memoir; a biography on John James Audubon; and four novels. He has received numerous fellowships for research and writing, including grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a host and correspondent for documentaries on public television’s Frontline and American Experience series. An affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, he lectures frequently to audiences in the United States and abroad. His third volume of nuclear history, ''Endgame: The Unmaking of the Nuclear Arms Race,'' which examines the international politics of nuclear weapons in the last years of the Cold War, will be published in fall 2007 by Alfred A. Knopf. He lives with his wife, Ginger, a clinical psychologist in private practice in San Francisco, near Half Moon Bay, Calif.

Russell Banks - 2006 Visiting faculty

Russell Banks, visiting faculty member in the M.F.A. program, has written a dozen novels and short story collections that have won him Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts grants and a St. Lawrence Prize for fiction.

Banks' titles include "Affliction" and "The Sweet Hereafter," which were adapted into critically acclaimed, award-winning feature films; Martin Scorcese is producing the film of "Cloudsplitter" for HBO; "Searching for Survivors"; "Family Life"; "Hamilton Stark"; "The New World"; "The Book of Jamaica," which is being adapted into a feature film; "Trailer Park"; "The Relation of My Imprisonment"; "Continental Drift," also being adapted into a feature film; "Success Stories"; and "Rule of the Bone." His latest novel, "The Darling," set in 20th-century Liberia, was selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of 2004.

Banks' poems, stories and essays have appeared in The Boston Globe Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Vanity Fair and Harpers.

The New York State Author from 2004 to 2006, he has received numerous awards, including the Ingram Merrill Award, the John Dos Passos Award and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is president of the International Parliament of Writers and the founding president of the North American Network of Cities of Asylum.